business of the seller of indulgences. For what
did the right teaching of their own Church signify to the papists of
the sixteenth century? It was money that they craved for their women
and children, their relatives, and princely houses. There was a fearful
community of interests between the bishops and the fanatical members of
the mendicant orders. Nothing had made Huss and his tenets so
insupportable to them as the struggle against the sale of indulgences:
the great Wessel had been driven out of Paris into misery for teaching
repentance and grace; and it was the sellers of indulgences who caused
the venerable Johannes Vesalia to die in the prison of a monastery at
Mayence, he who first spoke the noble words, "Why should I believe what
I know?"

It is known how prevalent the traffic in indulgences became in Germany
in the beginning of the sixteenth century, and how impudently the
reckless cheating was carried on. When Tetzel, a well-fed haughty
Dominican, rode into a city with his box of indulgences, he was
accompanied by a large body of monks and priests: the bells were rung;
ecclesiastics and laymen met him, and reverentially conducted him to
the church; his great crucifix, with the holes of the nails, and the
crown of thorns, was erected in the nave, and sometimes the believers
were allowed to see the blood of the Crucified One trickling down the
cross. Church banners, on which were the arms of the Pope with the
triple crown, were placed by the cross; in front of it the cursed box,
strongly clamped with iron, and near these on one side, a pulpit from
which the monk set forth with rough eloquence the wonderful powers of
his indulgences, and showed a large parchment of the Pope's with many
seals appended to it. On the other side was the pay table, with
indulgence tickets, writing materials, and money baskets; there the
ecclesiastical coadjutors sold to the thronging people everlasting
salvation.[21]

Countless were the crimes of the Church, against which all the wounded
moral feelings of the Germans were roused. The opposition spread all
over Germany; but the man had not yet appeared, who, by a fearful
inward struggle, discerning all the griefs and longings of the people,
was preparing to become the leader of his nation, which would in his
determined character, see with enthusiasm its own mind embodied. For
two years he had been teacher of natural philosophy and dialects in the
new university of Wittenberg, and was